How Muslims Do Apologetics:
The Apologetic Approach of Muhammad Ali and Its Implications for Christian
Apologetics by John Warwick
Montgomery

During the early decades of the present century,
Christian apologetics suffered a considerable loss of popularity and prestige.
Reactionary defenders of the faith such as Willam Jennings Bryan (at the Scopes
evolution trial in 1925) disgusted laymen and clergymen alike. The growing
strength of Protestant modernism, with its tolerant attitude toward religious
differences, was heralded by the publication of such works as "Yes But-":
the Bankruptcy of Apologetics by Willard L. Sperry, Dean of the Harvard
Divinity School,1 as well as by the various
volumes of the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, which attempted to redefine
the goal of missionary activity in terms of cooperative interaction among the
various world religions.2 In spite of
modernism's decreasing influence following World War II, the average American
still seems to accept the following philosophy:

It doesn't. . . make too
much difference whether you are Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, or, for that
matter, Hindu or Mohammedan. They are all different ways to the same goal.
Basically they follow the same moral code and the religious uplift is the same.
. . Probably the religion of the future will succeed in incorporating the best
insights of them all. Christian missionaries, therefore, should not impose
their views on others but should rather sit at a round table and pool their
views for the good of all. Confucious, Lao-tse, Asoka, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and then finally Jesus! These are the great leaders of mankind.3

Those whose thinking operates on a more logical and
less emotional basis have seldom been satisfied with this kind of approach,
however. The various religions of the world maintain vital beliefs that are
reciprocally contradictory-tenets that are absolutely irreconcilable in many
instances. To the Christian, Jesus is "Very God of Very God"; to the Jew or the
Muslim, this is blasphemy. To the Christian, human sin was dealt with on the
cross by substitutionary atonement: to the Eastern believer in karma and
to the adherent of Islam such a concept is not only meaningless, but positively
immoral. Obviously, such opposing views as these cannot both be right; both
views may be wrong, but both cannot be correct. Since, moreover, eternal
salvation (or, at a minimum, earthly happiness) is in most religious systems
made contingent upon right belief, the verification of a religion becomes a
matter of no little importance. Recognition of this fact in Christian circles
appears to be on the upswing again, especially in the face of Marxian attempts
to discredit Christian theology. "The problems of the present have moved to a
deep level which calls. . . for apologetics. ..; and there are evidences that
apologists are recovering their nerve and their freedom to operate, while the
self-confidence of those who turned rather to the philosophy of religion is no
longer so daunting." 4

The need for
a virile Christian apologetic in our day gives good reason for our stepping
outside the Christian frame of reference to observe the apologetic approach of
a modern adherent of a non-Christian religion. An examination of his arguments
will yield valuable information, both directly and indirectly, with regard to
what constituies a meaningful and valid religious apologetic. The non-Christian
apologist chosen for study here is Muhammad Ali, of Islam's Ahmadiyya movement.

The Man and His
Movement

Maulvi, or Maulana,
Muhammad Ali,5 M.A. LL.B., has been well
termed "a liberally educated, devout Moslem."6 He was born in 1875 and died in 1951,7 and his lifetime devotion to the Islamic
cause is accurately reflected in a prolific literary output: Muhammad the
Prophet; Early Caliphate; The Babi Religion; Manual of Hadth; New
World Order; The Living Thoughts of the Prophet Muhammad; An Urdu
Commentary of the Holy Qur' an; An Urdu Commentary of Sohih Bukhari;
The Religion of Islam; The Holy Qur' an, Containing the Arabic Text
with English Translation and Commentary.8 The latter work is cited by Robert Hume as
one of five standard English translations of the entire Koran,9 and is listed as one of the three
authoritative English translations of the Koran in C. M. Winchell's basic
Guide to Reference Books, seventh edition.10

Muhammad Ali's leadership in the
Lahore branch of the Muslim Ahmadiyya movement makes it important to outline
briefly the history and aims of that group.11 James Thayer Addison, sometime professor of
the history of religion and missions in the Episcopal Theological School,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes of the Ahmadiyya;

It began with the activity
of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in the village of Qadian, in the Punjab. In 1891 this
Sunni Mohammedan declared himself to be . . . the coming Mahdi. Though
condemned by the mulluhs as a heretic, he maintained for the next seventeen
years a vigorous propaganda in support of his claims. Three years after his
death in 1908, his followers were estimated at nearly 50,000. In 1914, the sect
split into two divisions, since known as the Qadian group and the Lahore
group.. . The Lahore party, more free in its tendencies, is despised by the
Qadiani. . . in keeping with their wider ambitions, they refer to their founder
not as the Messiah but only as a reformer. Both parties are distinguished for
their missionary zeal. Missions of one or of both sects are to be found not
only in every province of India, but also in such areas as the Malay States,
West Africa, and Palestine, where Moslems live under European control. . . Both
wings of the Ahmadiyya are busy in the production of literature and the
promotion of reforms, and they offer to the young Moslem today his best chance
for fellowship with a community, which, though heterodox, is thoroughly alive
and in many directions progressive. The whole movement, it should be added, is
markedly and often bitterly anti-Christian.12

Reference to the Ahmadiyya movement as 'heterodox"
should not lead us to believe that Muhammad Ali and other members of the Lahore
society are presenting a fundamentally unique variety of Islam. The adherents
of the Lahore Ahmadiyya "have tended to come steadily closer to orthodoxy."13 Moreover, their "heterodoxy" seems to lie
chiefly in their attempt to understand the Koran without the accretions of
tradition, and to engage in aggressive missionary activity.14 The Ahmadiyya movement is "the only Moslem
group seriously trying to convert Western Christians";15 that this should produce inter-Muslim
conflict is understandable when one recalls the historic apathy of Islam to
nonviolent propagation of the faith. Consider, for example, the following
statements in Douglas C. McMurtrie's widely used history of printing:

Islam, in marked contrast
to Buddhism, was uncompromisingly opposed to the reduplication of its sacred
writings through the medium of print. The reason for this opposition is not
clear, but in all probability it was simply religious conservatism. The Koran
had been given to the Moslems in written form, and writing, therefore, was the
only means by which it might ever be transmitted. To this day the Koran has
never been printed from type in any Mohammedan country; is it always reproduced
by lithography.16

The Content of Muhammad Ali's
Apologetic

Having obtained an
overview of Muhammad Ali and the movement with which he has been identified,
let us examine in detail his defense of Islam. Muhammad Ali's two main writings
will be utilized in this connection: his edition and translation of the
Koran,17 and his systematic presentation of
The Religion of Islam.18 One who
studies these two volumes discovers that the author's apologetic for Islam has
a negative and a positive side. Negatively, Islam's chief rival, Christianity,
is criticized; positively, the claim is made that Islam harmonizes with the
modern scientific and philosophical Weltanschauung, possesses a divinely
inspired scripture, and is experientially self-attesting. Each of these
apologetic arguments will now be set forth.

Christianity: a
false religion Samuel M. Zwemer, late missionary to those of the
Islamic faith, well characterized the general Ahmadiyya attitude toward
Christianity when he wrote:

The old Islam honoured
Jesus Christ as a great prophet, and although it denied his deity and atoning
death it always acknowledged his sinlessness and virgin birth. The New Islam
denies the sinlessness of Jesus, mocks at the virgin birth, and offers proof
from the writings of infidels and from modern destructive criticism that the
Bible is a tissue of fables and myths. It is painful to read thearticles
written on these subjects by men who in some cases are graduates of Christian
colleges.19

Both Ahmadiyya groups have rejected the traditional
belief (orthodox but not koranic) "which had come into Islam after its
expansion, relating to Christ as returning from Heaven to the world in order to
subdue antiChrist and bring in a Muslim millennial state of bliss arid
righteousness."20 Although Muhammad Ali is
by no means as crass in his criticisms of Christianity as some Ahmadiyya
writers,21 his position is nevertheless
strongly negative toward the New Testament and toward Christian views of
Christ. Muhammad Ali maintains that Jesus was sinless, for he was a prophet and
all prophets are without sin: but in his moral purity Jesus did not differ at
all from Adam or Moses or John the Baptist, who were also prophets (Holy
Qur'an, pp. 159-62, 612, 615; Religion of Islam, pp. 232-. 40)..
Christian theology has made a grievous error in asserting that Jesus is the
unique Son of God (Holy Qur'an, pp. 272-74). The resurrection and
ascension of Jesus never took place (he did not actually die as a result of
crucifixion, but much later suffered a na:ural death); the Second Coming of
Christ is an unwarranted hope (Holy Qur'an, pp. 241-44; Religion of
Islam. p. 262). "Recent criticism has shown that the Christians have only
followed previous idolatrous nations in deifying a man" (Holy Qur'an, p.
274). He claims that the Christian church has been led to these false beliefs
by strict reliance upon the Bible as historically accurate. However, "modem
criticism of the Bible, together with the accessibility of ancient manuscripts,
has now established the fact that many alterations were made in it. . . - Even
the Gospels are admitted to have been altered. The original Gospel of Jesus
Christ is nowhere to be found...Many examples of changes made in the text can
be quoted. . . . Commenting on. . . Mk. 10:17, Dummelow [The One Bible
Commentary (London, Macmillan, 1913) says. . .: 'The author of Matthew . .
. altered the text slightly, to prevent the reader from supposing that Christ
denied that He was good' (Religion of Islam, pp. 212-44).

Islam: philosophically and scientifically sound In Muhammad
Ali's opinion, Islam, more than any other religion, accords with the dynamic,
evolutionary worldview of twentieth-century science and philosophy. He writes:

With the advent of Islam,
religion has received new significance. Firstly, it is to be treated not as a
dogma, which a man must accept if he will escape everlasting damnation, but as
a science based on the universal experience of humanity, it is not this or that
nation that becomes the favourite of God and the recipient of Divine
revelation; on the contrary, revelation is recognized as a necessary factor in
the evolution of man. Hence while in its crudest form it is the universal
experience of humanity, in its highest, that of prophetical revelation, it has
been a Divine gift bestowed upon all nations of the world. And the idea of the
scientific in religion has been further strengthened by presenting its
doctrines as principles of action. There is not a single doctrine of religion
which is not made the basis of action for the development of man to higher and
yet higher stages of life. Secondly, the sphere of religion is not confined to
the next world; its primary concern is rather with this life, and that man,
through a righteous life here on earth may attain to the consciousness of a
higher existence (Religion of Islam. pp. 5-6).

The Koran: divinely inspired
Muhammad Ali is at pains to demonstrate thai the Koran, in its origin,
transmission, arrangement, and lofty subject matter, is indeed the final
revelation of God to men (Holy Qur'an, Preface, pp. xxviii-xcii;
Religion of Islam, pp. 17 - 57). It is asserted that the Koran contains
no discrepancies; the theory of abrogation (not entirely dissimilar to the
Christian notion of "progressive revelation") is rejected (Religion of
Islam, pp 35-44; Holy Qur'ân, pp. lxxv-xcü).

Muhammad
Ali's translation of the Koran tries, within the limits of Arabic vocabulary
and syntax1 to tone down difficult passages and thus to provide the twentieth
century reader with a more scientifically and historically palatable text. For
example, Muhammad Ali removes any notion of miracles from the statement of
Joseph in Egypt to his brothers as given in Surah 12:93. George Sale's
translation has, "Depart ye with this my inner garment, and throw it on my
father's face; and he shall recover his sight."22. J. M. Rodwell translates the same verse:
"Go ye with this my shirt and throw it on my father's face, and he shall
recover his sight"23 Marmaduke Pickthall
expresses it thus: "Go with this shirt of mine and lay it on my father's face,
he will become (again) a seer."24 However,
Muhammad Ali renders the verse, '4Take this my shirt and cast it before my
father, he will come to know" (Holy Qur'an, p. 493). Professor Arthur
Jeffery is unjust in citing this as evidence that Muhammad Ali's translation is
"doctored" and "forced" (because Muhammad Ali goes against the traditional
understanding of the passage);25the Arabic
word 'basir' can mean either "one who sees things with the eyes" or "one
endowed with mental perception, one knowing," as Pickthall's mediating
translation indicates. But we do have in Muhammad Ali's version an obvious
apologetic attempt to make the Koran relevant to the modern mind. The
fulfillment of koranic prophecy is cited by Muhammad Ali as a further proof of
the Koran's divine origin. Particular emphasis is placed upon the prophecy of
Islam's triumph.

The Holy Qur'ân gives
prominence to the great prophecy of the triumph of Islam, and its earlier
chapters are full of such prophecies uttered in various forms. Now these
chapters were revealed, and these prophecies announced, at a time when the Holy
Prophet was quite alone and helpless, beset by enemies on all sides plotting to
put an end to his very life. . . . Yet under these circumstances, amid all this
despair on every side, we find prophecy after prophecy announced in the surest
and most certain terms to the effect that the great forces of opposition should
be brought to naught, that the enemies of Islam should be put to shame and
perish, that Islam should become the religion of the whole of Arabia, that the
empire of Islam should be established and battles be fought in which the
Muslims should be victorious and the enemy brought low, that Islam should
spread to the farthest corners of the earth and that it should ultimately be
triumphant over all religions of the world. . . . Was not all this brought to
fulfillment, against all expectations, in the lifetime of the Holy Prophet?
(Religion of Islam. pp. 248-50).

The Islamic beliefs are
really axiomatic truths upon which are based the moral and spiritual aspects of
the life of man.. .. The precepts of Islam which inculcate duties towards God
and duties towards man are based on that deep knowledge of human nature which
cannot be possessed but by the Author of that nature. They cover the whole
range of the different grades of the development of man, and are thus
wonderfully adapted to the requirements of different peoples. In the Holy
Qur'ân are found guiding rules for the ordinary man of the world as well
as for the philosopher, and for communities in the lowest grade of civilization
as well as for the highly civilized nations of the world. Practicability is the
keynote of its precepts, and thus the same universality which marks its
principles of faith is to be met within its practical ordinances, suiting as
they do the requirements of all ages and nations" (Holy Qur'an, p.
xiii).

A Critique
of Muhammad Ali's Apologetic and its Bearing upon the Christian Defensio
Fidei

Muhammad Ali
Criticized Arguments in support of a religious viewpoint normally
fall into one of two general categories, the rational or the empirical. A
rational apologetic attempts to show that the religious belief is
philosophically sound and conforms to the best dictates of reason, while an
empirical apologetic tries to prove that the religion harmonizes with factual
experience. Empirical arguments can be objective or subjective in nature,
depending upon whether harmony with external experience (history, physical and
natural Science) or conformity with internal (psychological) experience is
stressed.27 The following table summarizes
the most common apologetic arguments used to support religious conceptions and
classifies these arguments according to their rational or empirical character.

Rational Defenses

Empirical Defenses

Objective

Subjective

1. The religion is deductible
from self-evident a prioris.

1. The scriptures (or
doctrines) of the religion fit the historical and scientific facts of
experience.

1. The religion is
pragmatically sound.

2. The religion conforms to the
philosophical viewpoint or presuppositions generally accepted (the
philosophical Zeitgeist).

2. The religion has given rise
to valid prophecies of future events.

2. The religion is personally
meaningful and self-validating in the life of the believer.

3. The scriptures (or
doctrines) of the religion are internally self-consistent.

Muhammad Ali's attempt at
refuting Christianity does not fit into the table of apologetic arguments at
any point. The reason for this is simply that such refutations are not
'apologies" or defenses at all, but are ad hominem arguments of an
offensive nature. Even if one were to grant that Muhammad Ali had disproven
Christianity, this would not add a grain of evidence in support of Islam, for
Islam (and all other religions, for that matter) could still be false. The
falsity of one religion, in other words, is not proof of the truth of another.
Unfortunately, the Ahmadiyya movements have been almost totally blind to this
fact in their propaganda activities.

Strictly speaking, Muhammad Ali
does not try to show that Islam is deducible from self-evident a prioris, for
he recognizes that the Muslim faith is based on historical revelation. However,
as we have seen, he does claim that Islam conforms to the activistic,
evolutionary Weltanschauung of modem scientific and cultural philosophy.
Unlike the medieval Averroës, who, in his treatise, The Agreement of
Religion and Philosophy, asserted that the Aristotelian philosophy of his
time could not be reconciled with koranic teaching,28Muhammad Ali affirms that contemporary
secular thought and Islamic doctrine blend perfectly. The fallacy in such an
argument lies in the fact that the philosophical scene is kaleidoscopic-that
the Zeitgeist is never an absolute. The static universe of one era
became the relativistic, evolutionary universe of the next; and who is to say
what cosmological views future generations will hold? Conformity to current
philosophical views (even if granted) is therefore no proof of the validity of
a religion. A second rational argument presented by Muhammad Ali is his claim
that the Koran is internally consistent-that it contains no internal
contradictions. This apologetic is likewise of little consequence, for the
self-consistency of a writing does not prove that it is divine revelation.
Euclid's Geometry, for example, is not self-contradictory at any point, but no
one claims that this work is therefore divinely inspired in some unique sense.

When we consider Muhammad Ali' s objectively empirical defenses of
Muslim faith, we find that he employs the first two arguments given in the
table above, but not the third one. Miracles, he believes, are next to
impossible to prove, and therefore of little attesting value;29moreover, "the Holy Qur'ãn makes it
clear that the bringing about of a transformation is the real object for which
prophets are raised up, that this object is attained by several means, each of
which, therefore, has but a secondary value, and that among these evidences of
the truth of the Prophet the miracle occupies not the highest place"
(Religion of Islam. p. 243). For Muhammad Ali, the greatest miracle of
Islam is the Holy Qur'ãn (ibid. - p. 244), and therefore he is
concerned, as we have seen, to show that the Koran is scientifically and
historically sound and contains true prophecies. To demonstrate that a writing
is accurate in its historic and scientific statements, however, no more proves
that it is divinely inspired than when one shows that the volume is internally
consistent. Numerous accurate scientific and historical treatises have been
written which lay no claim to divine inspiration, and for which no such claim
has been made by their readers.

With regard to the evidential value
of prophecy, one is on more solid ground, if fulfilled prophecy of sufficient
worth can be cited. But the qualification just stated poses a real problem, for
many prophecies of the Delphic oracle variety have been made through history.
Moreover, the koranic prophecy of Islam's ultimate triumph is of little
significance, for though Islam experienced a very rapid early spread, the later
history of the religion has been anything but triumphant.30 In 1924, in fact, a member of the Ahmadiyya
movement stated in London: "We, the present-day Moslems, have indeed fallen on
evil days. Our past glory has forsaken us. Our might, our honour, have deserted
us."31

Muhammad Ali's main
apologetic thrust is in the area of subjectively empirical argument. "The
supreme object before the Prophet is to effect a moral and spiritual
transformation; the means adopted are an appeal to the reason-ing faculty, an
appeal to the heart of man to convince him that the Divine message is meant for
his own uplift, and lessons drawn from previous history showing how the
acceptance of truth has always benefited man, and its rejection has worked to
his own undoing" (Religion of Islam, p. 243). The difficulty with
pragmatic arguments for a religion is that truths do not always work, and
beliefs that work are by no means always true. Job's religious beliefs, though
presumably true, did not give him uninterrupted peace of mind; and many besides
Faust have discovered that the father of lies makes an effective business
partner. Subjective attestation for a religion has the engaging advantage of
becoming meaningful only if the individual actually attempts to believe in the
religion, and then, of course, no further apologetic is necessary. But the
intelligent person, faced with several religious options, needs objective,
external ground for trying a religion, and he is morally within his rights to
refuse to become emotionally involved in a religion without good reasons to do
so. Such "good reason" must of course lie in a realm other than the
subjectively empirical, if a neat case of circular reasoning is to be avoided.

Lessons for Christian
Apologists

The reader has
undoubtedly been impressed (as has the writer) with the similarity between many
of Muhammad Ali's arguments for Islam and the defenses for the Christian faith
presented by not a few Christian theologians. It is safe to say that the type
of theologian of whom I speak would have been only too quick to agree with the
criticisms of Muhammad Ali set forth above. One wonders, however, if the great
truth would have dawned that a fallacious argument is fallacious regardless of
who employs it and regardless of the context in which it is used.

Specifically, no religion is deducible from self-evident a prioris, or all men
in their right minds would hold the same faith.32 Conformity to the philosophical
Zeitgeist is no evidence for the truth of a religion, regardless of what
religion it is. Internal consistency and external fitting of the facts do not
prove a sacred book to be God's revelation-even if that book be the Bible. The
reasonableness of religious doctrines does not prove them true (for God is
presumably above reason, since he is the Author of logic), nor does it prove
them false (credo quia absurdum is a ridiculous formula, even if
reiterated by a modern philosopher of Sørcn Kierkegaard's stature).
Pragmatic arguments for a religion are weak and positively misleading-even if
Norman Vincent Peale asserts them again in behalf of Christianity. The appeal
to "try such-and-such religion and you will find it self- authenticating in
your heart of hearts" is the mark of apologetic debility, for such claims can
be made by everyone from Muhammad Ali to Father Divine without fear of
refutation (there being no possible refutation for individual experience).

It is time that Christian apologists came to realize that a string of
individually weak arguments for the gospel does not comprise one strong
argument for it. Objective empirical evidence for Jesus Christ and his message
is the only truly valid Christian apologetic possible, for it alone is subject
to the canons of evidence employed in other fields of endeavor. And what
objectively empirical ground for accepting the Christian gospel is there?
Muhammad Ali himself states it when he writes,' If Jesus did not rise from the
dead, the pillar on which the whole structure of Christianity rests crashes to
the ground" (Religion of Islam, p. 241). The kerygma of the early
church, as seen in the preaching recorded in the Book of Acts, centers its case
squarely and decisively upon the fact of Christ's resurrection, and the apostle
Paul states the Christian apologetic in no less definite terms when he writes
to the Corinthians (I Cor. 15:1-9, 14):

Now I would remind you,
brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in
which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast- unless you
believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also
received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that
he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
scriptures, and that be appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one
time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he
appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely
born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be
called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God... . If Christ has
not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain (1
Cor. 15:1-4, 6-9. 14).

If
the Christian church is indeed on the verge of a revival of apologetic
interest, it is hoped that the resurrection of Christ will be made the pivot of
that interest so that the errors of Muhammad Ali will not be further duplicated
in a Christian framework.33

2.
Rethinking Missions was published in 1932. In 1933, the Inquiry issued
the Regional Reports of the Commission of Appraisal (3 vols.), and the
Factfinders Reports (4 vols). William Ernest Hocking, professor of
philosophy at Harvard, headed the Inquiry.

11. Here it may
be well to obviate confusion by distinguishing our Muhammad Ali from the
Khilafot leader Maulanna Muhammad Ali (1878 - 1931), one of the great leaders
of Muslim India in the post-World War I era, and the founder of the National
Moslem University of Aligarh.

15. Addison, The Christian Approach to the Moslem: a
Historical Study p. 209. An execption may be made to groups working among
blacks in the United States. Consult: C. Umhau Wolf, "Muslims in the American
MidWest," The Muslim World (Jan. 1960); C. Braden, "Islam in
America," International Review of Missions (July, 1959); C. Braden,
"Moslem Missions in America," Religion in Life (summer, 1959); N.
Makdisi, "The Moslems of America," The Christian Century (August 26,
1959).

16. Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Book:
the Story of Printing and Bookmaking, 3rd rev. ed. (London and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 93. The strictly orthodox Muslim Marmaduke
Pickthall is careful not to title his English translation of the Koran simply
The Koran or The Glorious Koran, but rather The Meaning of the
Glorious Koran (New York: Knopf, 1930). He states in his Foreword, "The
Koran cannot be translated. That is the belief of old-fashioned Seykhs and the
view of the present writer." [Yet A. A. Paton, in his A History of the
Egyptian Revolution (London: Trubner, 1870, second ed. enlarged. Vol 2, p.
245) wrote: "The printing of the Koran has always been resisted by the Ulema as
unlawful; but for the first time in the history of Islamism, an edition of the
Koran was set up in type, and the Mufti of Cairo, Sheikh - el Temimy, was asked
to set his seal of permission upon it in order to ensure its sale" - Ed. of
The Muslim World.]

17. This work has
gone through three editions containing Arabic text and English translation (1st
ed., Woking, England, Islamic Review, 1917; 2nd ed. Lahore, Ahmadiyya
Aajuman-i-Ishatt-Islam, and Woking and London, Unwin, 1920; 3rd ed., Lahore,
Almadyya Anjuman-i-Ishatt-i-Islam, 1935); and two editions without the Arabic
text and with abridged notes have been published (in 1928 and 1934). References
of this paper will in all cases be to the unabridged 3rd ed., a copy of which I
obtained from Lahore, together with Muhammad Ali's Religion of Islam.

18. I shall refer to the latest edition:
The Religion of Islam: A Comprehensive Discussion of the Sources, Principles
and Practices of Islam, 2nd ed. (Lahore, Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam,
1950 2nd ed. first pub. in 1935).

19. Samuel
M. Zwemer, Across the World of Islam, Studies in Aspects of the
Mohammedan Faith and in the present Awakening of the Moslem Multitiudes
(New York: Revell, 1929), p. 28.

21.
E.g. those who have written for the periodical, Review of Religions. See
Canon H. U. Weitbrecht, "Reform Movements in India," ch. 19 of Islam and
Missions, ed. Wheery, Zwemer, and Mylrea (New York: Revell, 1911) p. 281;
and Zwemer, Across the World of Islam, p. 29.

25. Arthur Jeffery, "New Trends in
Moslem Apologetic," ch. 20 of The Moslem World of Today, ed. John R.
Mott (New York, Dotan, 1925), pp. 318-19. Comments of the Baidawi and
Jallalo'ddin on the passage in question are given in Sale's translation of
The Koran.

27. Strictly
speaking, all apologetic arguments are rational in type, for Kant has shown
that philosophical presuppositions precede all forms of empirical inquiry.
However, the a prioris of empirical investigation (to be distinguished sharply
from those of logical positivism) are of a simple, self-evident variety, and
instead of precluding discovery and intellectual progress, seem to provide
valuable tools for investigative activity. Therefore, it appears wise to retain
the distinction between rational and empirical arguments - a distinction
incidentally, which is fundamental in understanding the role and development of
modern science.

29. "There is one great disadvantage
attaching to all miracles which are merely manifestations of power. It is very
difficult to secure reliable evidence for them under all
circumstances...Another difficulty to the matter of miracles generally is to be
found in the fact that however wonderful a performance, it may be explained
scientifically, and thus lose all value as a sign of the Divine mission of its
workers" (Religion of Islam, p. 246).

30. See, for example, the chapers on "Why the Spread of Islam
Was Stayed" and "Low Position of Islam in the Scale of Civilization" in Two
Old Faiths, by J. M. Mitchell and William Muir (New York, Chatauqua Press,
1891), pp. 125-52; and the section on "The Islamic Empire and Its Dissolution"
in Carl Brockelmann's History of the Islamic Peoples, trans. Carmichael
and Perlmann (New York: Putnam, 1947), pp. 107 ff.

32. Only deductive logic and
theoretical mathematics, among human disciplines, are deduced from self-evident
presuppositions, and these areas, it should be carfully observed, deal with no
matters-of-fact at all, but only with conceptual relationships. Even Thomas
Aquinas rejected the ontological proof of God's existence.

33.
For an example of a Resurrection-centered modern work on Christian apologetics,
see Wilbur M. Smith, The Supernaturalness of Christ (Boston: W. A.
Wilde, 1940).

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